In a huge stadium, before a bloodthirsty crowd of screaming
adolescents, under the eye of network television cameras, the ex-
popstar President of the United States forces his Cabinet members
to risk their lives playing Russian Roulette in the ultimate test
of their loyalty.

An episode from those Generation Gap thinkpieces, Logan's
Run (1967) or Wild in the Streets (1968)? Perhaps one of the
scenarios from DC Comics's short-lived 1973 title Prez,
featuring the "first teen president"? No, this moment of alarmist
hyperbole comes from Robert Shirley's Teenocracy, a campily
compelling future history whose retrospective unlikelihood reveals
just how wrong a linear sf projection can be.

In 1979 came the great Teen Strike, propelling a rocker known
only as the Fab into the Presidency of the USA, hereafter renamed
the United Teenocracy. Stripped of the vote, oldsters are not
otherwise persecuted, and twelve years onward the ruling teens
mainly indulge themselves in hedonism ("hepsi" is the artificial
aphrodisiac of choice, which leads to "coiting") while the economy
hums smoothly along. The Fab's Veep, Ken Catto---aka, King Cat---
is the real star of this novel, a conflicted ex-teen whose subtle
rebellion against his power-mad friend forms the main narrative.

Shirley convincingly portrays home VCRs, a proto-internet,
virtual reality, genetic engineering, and rampant American
imperialism and consumerism (the "Secretary of Style" is an
important office). But such antique riffs as "panty raids" and
the secession of Mississippi, along with his reality-blindsided
doomsaying, ultimately make us say, "Don't trust any novels over
thirty."